He is tormented by the local children and his life is miserable, lonely and full of fear. In the poem he gets describes as 'A solitary mister' which reflects on the fact that he is isolated from the society. Similarly 'The Clown Punk' is a piteous man who is not accepted by the society because of his identity and the way he looks. In the poem the narrator describes him as a 'basket of washing' which empathises on the fact that he is not respected and made fun of. The structures of both poems have been written to convey the isolation of the characters for example the poet in T.H.I.T.P has divided the poem into seven stanzas, each consist of six lines.
Tom McMahon stem B Literature Assisi by Norman MacCaig This poem was written by Norman MacCaig after a visit to the town of Assisi in the 1960s. The theme of the poem is exclusion and social injustice, also hypocrisy in the modern Catholic church. He uses a free structure containing no rhythm or rhyme he uses imagery such as similes and metaphors he uses contrast and irony. In the first two lines “the Dwarf with his hands-on backwards sat slumped like a half filled sack” contains many techniques, metaphor where the fact is the dwarfs hands on not literally backwards but twisted and deformed. He also uses a simile that the dwarf is like a half filled sack a valueless object made more so by being only half filled.
The dog, while of no working value, was a faithful companion to Candy. After its death, Candy was left in loneliness but instead of falling into despair, he chose to dream of the future along with George and Lennie. Another dog found in the novel was Lennie’s puppy. Lennie, unable to control his strength, accidentally kills the puppy when it bites him. Feeling alone and betrayed, Lennie is filled with sorrow and guilt.
‘The land’s sharp features’ reinforces a feeling of pain, with the alliteration of ‘his crypt the cloudy canopy’ intensifying this. These dark, gloomy descriptions of the landscape mirror the characters depression and pessimism. During these first two stanzas, the character seems pensive and meditative, with only the sudden ‘full hearted evensong’ of the thrush to awaken him. Beyond the first two stanzas, where ‘a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead’, the dark tone seems to deteriorate, as the ‘aged thrush’ begins to sing. The narrative of the poem suggests a sense of loneliness surrounding the man, which seems unusual, as it is New Years eve,
Identity is constituted by our external and internal self. Our identity is formed by both our view on ourselves - what we see in the mirror - and how society perceives us – how we act in accordance with our surrounding environment. Les Murray’s poem ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’, written in 1969, explores the concept of both the identity of the individual and of a collective group through the actions and reflections of a crying man and city society. Murray accentuates how city society reacts to the simple act of expressing emotion – they simply watch, fearfully. The individual is used by Murray to represent that which is common, emotion, and the beauty which it contains.
Literary Commentary In “July Man”, Margaret Avison delineates a bleak mood of sorrow and nostalgia for the beauty of the past through intricate diction, specifically the choice of adjectives, and sound. The morose image portrayed by the poet’s words reinforces the theme of the decomposition of nature and humanity. The structure of the poem is chaotic and spontaneous as there is no specific rhyme scheme and the length of the lines randomly alternate. Being a free verse poem perfectly fits the theme of decomposition for no order or structured standards are followed anymore and all aspects are breaking down, including the poem’s own stanzas. The stanzas are of extreme natures with the first one being nineteen lines long and the following one
We are told he is clearly diseased and nothing is said about a family which indicates he is alone. We are also given the writers emotions of disgust and sympathy and I will evaluate these. In the first stanza we are told that the beggar is: “Sprawled in the dust outside a Syrian store.” The word, “Sprawled” stands out to me as being a very hood indicator of the idea that he is occupying as much space as possible so that he may be noticed, and people might present him with their unneeded change. “Sprawled” begins with the letter “S” and the sound of that letter is repeated in the first line five times. Strictly speaking it is not alliteration but we are given a similar effect and it allows our ears to be hooked on the first line and encourage us to continue into the poem.
Ethan is influenced by his grim surroundings and becomes a bitter, melancholy man. A lot of his sad nature has to do with his surroundings, as the barren and empty characteristics of Starkfield have forced Ethan to become bitter and pitiful. At the beginning of the story the narrator clearly states Starkfield’s influence on Ethan’s appearance: “He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.” (Wharton 13) A character’s attributes depend on the location he grows up on. His face looks as gloomy as the night, cheerless and bleak.
“Brainstorm’s” prosody links the literal and figurative levels of the poem and orchestrates a profound concluding insight. At first reading, one may not notice that this free-flowing poem actually has a strict and regular rhyme scheme—a/b/a/b; c/d/c/d and so on, until the final solitary, unrhymed line—“inside his head he heard the stormy crows.” The regular rhyme lulls the reader into a soporific sense that perhaps this is merely observation and description. The solitary crows have been described as flying overhead and then walking on the rooftop; the lack of rhyme in the final line emphasizes the subtle blending of the physical and mental worlds of the ponderer. Although most of the rhymes are simple and clear (“alone/groan; snow/show; veins/mains”), Nemerov also makes use of slant rhyme, which has a disturbing and
Owen sympathizes with the vain young men who have no idea of the horrors of war, who are 'seduced' by others (Jessie Pope) and the recruiting posters. The detail in Owen's poetry puts forward his scenes horrifically and memorably. His poems are suffused with the horror of battle. Many of Owen's poems bring across disturbing themes and images, which stay in the mind long after readers have read them. His aim is not poetry, but to describe the full horrors of war.